Behavioral "uh-oh" feeling

Posted on February 13, 2008 by Nate Westheimer

After visiting some credit report sites today (I had to dispute something, which I won), I was more than a little weirded out to see a LifeLock banner ad on CNN.

I could be totally wrong here, as I have no idea if CNN is running behavioral ads or not, but considering I’ve been on CNN’s Political Ticker blog a dozen times a day for the last month and never seen a LifeLock ad before the day I was on credit report websites, my privacy comfort-zone radar went nuts, assuming I had just been “behavioraled.”

So this is what a behavioral ad feels like?

Getting served what felt like a behavioral ad gave me the “uh-oh” feeling you’re supposed to tell a trusted adult (or blog audience) about.

Now, the question remains: was the “uh-oh” of the Facebook’s News Feeds variety (i.e. quickly accepted after an initial push-back)? Or, was the “uh-oh” more like a Facebook Beacon issue (where publishers will have to revert back to more arcane targeting methodologies)?

The answer to this question is important. Esther Dyson wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday evangelizing the coming of the social and behavioral ad, but if publishers and targeting companies can’t get the comfort factor right, the technologies may never come to their full potential.

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  • http://jeremystein.tumblr.com jeremy

    there needs to an element of control. the next generation of ad networks will be user centric. in the not too distant future we will be able to strike a balance between relevancy and privacy.

  • Dick

    Gosh, I think targeted, behavioral ads will just blend in. Folks will just accept them as “normal.” Consider how Facebook and MySpace users have lost all inhibition about revealing private information in a public arena — or how today’s highschoolers accept speech restrictions and invasions to their privacy that previous generations would have blanched over. These ads will become what most ads have become — accepted as the theme music to our everyday lives.

  • http://insanewayne.blogspot.com Wayne Mulligan

    @Dick – great call! People talk about “web 2.0″ and how it’s a set of technologies or something…I’d argue that web 2.0 was all about people’s states of mind. People were no longer scared of sending sensitive information over the web or displaying private information in a public forum – they reached a new level of comfort and that’s what allowed technologies like Facebook, etc. to flourish.

    @Nate – you probably were “behavioraled” (great word by the way) – and since it was on CNN it probably came from Tacoda (a USV funded company: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2007/07/aoltime_warner_1.html).

    -Wayne

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